New Mystery Suspense

This introduction is not scholarly. It is not designed to impress, but to connect with possibly new fans of Joseph Conrad. As the current trends of purges of past collide with the present, it is my hope this work will not be one of those deleted or banned in libraries. Conrad began writing Suspense in 1920, four years before his death. Yet as early in 1905, the late author used Memories of the Countess De Boigne as a basis for many of the characters the listener will see in the work. This is not a slight; not many academics criticized Conrad for doing so.

Four years have passed since J.D. Damascus lost his wife and two children to the notorious French Quarter killer. The vicious slaying did not go unpunished, but J.D. is certain the wrong man was convicted. Once the most powerful district attorney in New Orleans, J.D. is now a down-and-out lawyer, barely scraping by.

Nineteenth-century New Orleans is a blazing hotbed of scorching politics and personal vendettas. And it’s into this fire that Benjamin January falls when he is hired to follow Oliver Weems, a bank official who has absconded with $100,000 in gold and securities. But it’s more than just a job for January. The missing money is vital to the survival of the school for freed slaves that he and his wife, Rose, have founded.

Hayley Powell, food and cocktails columnist for Bar Harbor's Island Times, is...well, kind of broke. So when she's selected for that extreme coupon-clipping reality game show coming to town...she's thrilled, especially when her competition is nasty nurse Candace Culpepper. But when Haley stumbles across a face-down-in-the-snow Candace - scissors gleaming between her shoulders - she knows the next thing she'll be selected for will probably be a police line-up.

Teagan is successful in her own right but she's not the crusader journalist she aspired to be back in college. She desperately needs a personal distraction and decides to make a difference in the world. When a foreign news story shocks her to the core, she takes matters into her own hands and starts a special project to help others. But not everybody is happy about her illegally funded venture: Project Rebound. When Teagan travels to Paris to deal with a project setback, she wakes up in the middle of a terrorist siege. Or is it a planned attack on her life?

Eighteen-year-old Jason Rogers’ life is turned upside-down when he finds himself in the custody of an unnamed government agency that is falsely accusing him of being responsible for the explosion that caused the death of his parents. Anya is 17 - a teenager who wishes she could be normal for once - but she’s not. A secret government agency, headed by none other than her father, knows how to leverage the dangerous capability she was born with. All goes well for her until one of the agents turns on her.

Dumped by her husband for a man, ex-rodeo queen Emily Bernal yearns for a fresh start. When a handsome local attorney named Jack offers her a gig, she's not sure if it's the right fit. But after a dead body takes a swan dive right in front of her and she learns a missing six-year-old girl is caught in the aftermath, Emily's heart sends her from barrel racing to paralegal work in a hurry. As she and Jack interrogate the young girl's tight-lipped mother, a string of strange coincidences don't seem to add up.

In the New England university town of Elm Harbor, a murder begins to crack the veneer that has hidden the racial complications of the town's past, the secrets of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence. At the center is Lemaster Carlyle, the university president, and his wife, Julia Carlyle, a deputy dean at the divinity school - African Americans living in "the heart of whiteness".

Celia is a beauty consultant who loves making her clients look good and helping her friends get out of trouble. She also has a bad habit of poking her nose in some police investigations. She's delighted when her dear friend announces that she'll be opening a nail parlor in the heart of town. Still, she's a little bit concerned about her friend's lack of business experience and the characters who'll be helping her in this venture. Celia becomes a nervous wreck when she hears that there's been a death at the nail parlor and her friend is the prime suspect.

Dave Robicheaux returns in another Bayou adventure, this one more gruesome and gut-wrenching than any that have come before. Hurricane Katrina has ravaged New Orleans, leaving the streets and buildings flooded and the city awash with opportunists, looters, and vicious criminals. There is no order, no law. Police are shooting randomly at innocent people, prison guards have abandoned their posts, and bodies float through the streets and hang from trees.

Ava had known Brandy since they were kids. She had a gift for knowing when people lied to her. Brandy never did. When her FBI-trained friend transferred back from New York to the New Orleans office, her first call was to her old friend. The ad for the apartment looked promising, so off they went. It wasn’t the best neighborhood. They could tell by the two gun shots. And just like that, there was a murder to solve.

As the fifth book in The New Homefront Series, Viking One serves as a stand-alone novel, chronicling the apparently orchestrated collapse of our fragile, modern world from the perspective of Jim and Lori Rutherford and friends, as their small town of Delaware City, Delaware begins to feel the noose tighten around them. As a preparedness-minded individual, Jim and crew, working together with friends, neighbors, and local authorities, try to secure their beloved town while keeping their minds open to the possibility of fleeing.

Nell Cosgrove is the new wife who got it all. She married her handsome, wealthy boss within six months of meeting him. They live in a beautiful riverside home. She has a flourishing career. The only problem is her two stepdaughters, Ruby and Poppy, who are fiercely loyal to their mother and reject all of Nell's overtures.

Twelve-year-old Daniel, the new kid in town, soon learns the truth about his nice - but odd - new friends: one can fly, another can turn invisible, yet another controls electricity. Incredible. The superkids use their powers to secretly do good in the town, but they’re haunted by the fact that the moment they turn thirteen, their abilities will disappear - along with any memory that they ever had them. Is a memory-stealing supervillain sapping their powers?

In a world ruled by faceless, uncaring mega-corporations, Frankie, a young woman who has resisted cybernetics, becomes the victim of a lethal Jacker Gang attack. Shot and left to die in the slums of Neo-London, she is found by a genius cybernetic doctor who is on the run from a powerful Corporation. Seeing an opportunity to finish his latest cybernetic masterpiece, he transplants Frankie's brain into a powerful prosthetic body. Frankie has barely woken up when the Corporation's forces attack and kidnap the doctor, forcing Frankie to go on the run in her new cybernetic body.

Ofelia Archer has faced demons, evil witches, and freaky zombies, but nothing could prepare her for the horror of meeting her boyfriend’s mother. For his part, Zacharias “Zach” Sully isn’t any more thrilled by his mother’s visit than his girlfriend. After one meal, a magical barrage of fire rains down on the group as they’re walking down Bourbon Street. When the flames clear, a young woman is left for dead, and the only thing they know about her is that she was part of a multilevel marketing scheme called Hexential Oils.

On a foggy night in the French Quarter... Brandy and Jiff were on a walk when they met him. Why did he hand her a note? There was something strange about the fellow. His clothes and hat made him look like a newspaper man from the '60s. But it was what he had typed on that piece of paper that deepened the mystery. A sort of prediction, that claimed three things would happen and they couldn’t stop it. Who was he? Why did Brandy believe him? She had always been good at reading people.

Alex encounters a tragic loss and near-deadly run-in with a ruthless crime syndicate. As Hanna helps him search for a dangerous killer, the surprise return of a lover from her past sends all hope of her future with Alex into a tailspin.

From a new coach's flagrant racism to a teammate's endless sabotage, best friends Andi Carillo and Jeff Michaels start basketball season mired in controversy. To make matters worse, the local media smells more than one juicy story. Will Andi and Jeff be able to help each other power through and find a way to put both their teams back on track?

Bradley, Brian, Nate, and Lucy are looking forward to a New Year's Eve party. But someone is leaving clues that there might be more to this celebration than confetti and noisemakers. The year ends with a surprise in this exciting conclusion to the Calendar Mysteries series.